Bird-Fish and Dog-Man May be Signs Hybrids are on the Rise

Any time someone has captured, seen or bred a creature whose description begins with “half-,” it’s rarely a good thing. It may make a good movie plot, but it’s usually not good for the creature nor those who encounter it. Such is the case with a few recent news stories about strange combinations of critters that defy the imagination, not to mention some laws of nature.

We start in the province of Guizhou in southern China where fishermen caught something that looks like a “half-fish, half-bird” – a birdmaid? Fortunately, they videotaped the creature so the world could witness what looks like the bottom half of a fish with a head resembling that of a pigeon and fins that look like wings. Whatever it is, it was probably sitting on a perch (ouch!).

The Asian media site zina.com reports the “bird head fish” was caught on June 6 and, after recording it on video (see it and photos here), the fishermen released it back into the waters to make more half-fish-half-birds or to look for a submarine and poop on its windshield. Speculation on what could have caused this anomaly ranged from pollution-related-genetic-mutation to a fish having a “story” with birds – now that’s a quaint colloquialism for sex!

A reporter tracked down Yang Xing, a Party committee secretary of the Fisheries Research Institute of Guizhou Academy of Agricultural Sciences (yes, everything in China seems to be associated with the “party”) who said the bottom half of the fish is a grass carp and the top half is a grass carp that looks like a bird.

“This phenomenon has been observed during the growth of fish. One of the main causes is the damage of fish eggs during embryonic development; the second is the high density during the fry cultivation and the lack of oxygen causes the head to become deformed … but it looks a little weird only."

Well, that’s not a great movie plot but it’s a relief to the residents of Guizhou and to the fish, which was released to swim, fly, peck at worms on hooks or whatever it does for another day.

Meanwhile, the strange creature in another video making the rounds is being described as a “half-human, half dog” (see it here) – never a good combination. Posted by the YouTube channel Nv Tv this week, it’s from 2015 and the vague details place the location as “USA” and the description as “black wolf/werewolf/dogman” which narrows it down to a blurry image of something bigger than the dog tormenting it. Since the creature never rises up on two legs, it’s hard to determine why the “dogman” description was used.

The same is true for the alleged dogman or werewolf creature killed in Montana last month. Those conducting visual inspections think it’s a wolf hybrid but they’re waiting for the slow-as-a-dogman-in-molasses DNA tests. Perhaps the lab should stay open in hopes of getting DNA samples from Pennsylvania as well, where the website Phantoms & Monsters is following up on three upright canine/werewolf/dogman sightings. This is the site run by Lon Strickler who has also been tracking the flying humanoids in Chicago. Half-man, half-bird?

Cryptozoologists have a hard enough time finding whole cryptids, so these half-and-half creatures are driving them half out of the minds. While hybrid folklore has been around for centuries, blaming them on pollution, radiation and genetic experiments is a recent and increasingly common phenomenon.

That’s not a good thing either.